This does not mean curl can fetch some JSON and print it to STDOUT. That would not be new. What it means is that the --write-out option now supports JSON as an output format. Pipe that output to a tool like jq and you get something like this:

{
"url_effective": "https://example.com/",
"http_code": 200,
"response_code": 200,
[lots more but I snipped them for length]
}

Here’s a heartwarming tale of how Backblaze broke libcurl’s copyright, then fixed it, then donated a hefty $15,600 to the project. Why that particular amount?

Backblaze was started in my living room on Jan 15, 2007 (13 years ago tomorrow) and that represents $100/month for every month Backblaze has depended on libcurl back to the beginning. / Brian Wilson, CTO of Backblaze

The scope creep of cURL is also something to behold, the program can do tons of stuff! Just look at the home page! With cURL having this many features (with the general mass of them being totally unknown to me, let alone how you use them) got me thinking… What if you could do a game show style challenge for them?

I couldn’t make it past the DELETE request (stage 3) without consulting Manuel. How far can you get?

You know we’re curl fanpeople around these parts, and we’re obviously not the only ones (it’s used by millions of people around the world!). In this brief post, Daniel Stenberg lays out seven common reasons people tell him why they use curl. This particular bit resonated with me:

No other tool or library for internet transfers have even close to the same amount of documentation, examples available on the net, existing user base that can help out and friendly users to support you when you run into issues.

We’ve been chronicling Daniel’s work on #curl for some time now. December 11, 2018 will be Daniel’s final official day at Mozilla. He assures us that his work on curl will continue, saying this in regards to his time dedicated to curl and where he works for his full-time income, “I don’t think my choice of future employer should have to affect that negatively too much, except of course in periods.”

Here are the main points from Daniel (but you should certainly dig into the details):

It’s been five great years, but now it is time for me to move on and try something else.

…lots of the HTTP/2 development and the publication of that was made while I was employed by Mozilla and I fondly participated in that.

…we’re also losing Mozilla as a primary sponsor of the curl project, since that was made up of them allowing me to spend some of my work days on curl and that’s now over.

I will continue to follow and work with HTTP and other internet protocols very closely.

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about 20 years of curl, what’s new with http2, and the backstory of QUIC - a new transport designed by Jim Roskind at Google which offers reduced latency compared to that of TCP+TLS+HTTP/2.

At this time in 1998 Titanic was winning 11 Oscars, My Heart Will Go On was topping the music charts, and Daniel Stenberg was uploading the first public release of one of the most useful tools in Internet history.

In this birthday post, Daniel walks down memory lane and says what those first few years were like:

It was far from an immediate success. An old note mentions how curl 4.8 (released the summer of 1998) was downloaded more than 300 times from the site.

We talked about curl on The Changelog when it was 17 years old. I think It’s time to bring Daniel back on to celebrate the big Two Oh. 🎊

If the total size is unknown, it will now instead display a small space ship flying across the line, back and forth – and it will only move as long as there is data being transferred. If it stalls, the little ship stops.

Daniel calls this new progress bar style “useless”, but we always love seeing people inject fun and whimsy in to their open source projects, even at curl’s state of maturity.

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about curl and libcurl and how he has spent at least 2 hours every day for the past 17 years working on and maintaining curl. That’s over 13k hours! We covered the origins of curl, how he chooses projects to work on, why he has remained so dedicated to curl all these years, the various version control systems curl has used, licensing, and more.

This is a bonus clip from the after call with Daniel Stenberg for episode #153. Daniel shared the details of a “magic feature” in curl that’s been there for over 6 years. It’s a feature he feels most people don’t know exists.